His Wife, The Secret Forensic Genius

His Wife, The Secret Forensic Genius

Gavin

5.0
Comment(s)
27.5K
View
24
Chapters

My fiancé, Jameson Blair, married my twin sister today. For five years, I was a placeholder, a substitute for the woman he truly wanted, and I pretended not to know. Today, she came back with a story of terminal cancer and a dying wish to marry him. It was a perfect lie, and he chose to believe it, shattering my world with three simple words: "She's Haleigh." They left me on the sidewalk, an outcast from my own blood. My brothers, who once promised to protect me, celebrated the woman who broke me. They moved my things to a guest room, making space for their prodigal sister. That night, Haleigh gave me a "welcome home" gift-a box with a brown recluse spider inside. As the venom coursed through me, my family rushed to her side, calling my agony "a little spider bite." They left me convulsing on the floor. Later, they whipped me for a crime I didn't commit, hung me off a cliff, and left me for dead. My body is a roadmap of their love. Each scar, each broken bone, is a testament to their betrayal. They believed her lies, but their real crime was never truly seeing me. As I clung to that cliff, bleeding and broken, a single thought consumed me: Isabella Douglas died here tonight. Now, Isabella Hale would be born from the ashes.

Chapter 1

My fiancé, Jameson Blair, married my twin sister today. For five years, I was a placeholder, a substitute for the woman he truly wanted, and I pretended not to know.

Today, she came back with a story of terminal cancer and a dying wish to marry him. It was a perfect lie, and he chose to believe it, shattering my world with three simple words: "She's Haleigh."

They left me on the sidewalk, an outcast from my own blood. My brothers, who once promised to protect me, celebrated the woman who broke me. They moved my things to a guest room, making space for their prodigal sister. That night, Haleigh gave me a "welcome home" gift-a box with a brown recluse spider inside.

As the venom coursed through me, my family rushed to her side, calling my agony "a little spider bite." They left me convulsing on the floor. Later, they whipped me for a crime I didn't commit, hung me off a cliff, and left me for dead.

My body is a roadmap of their love. Each scar, each broken bone, is a testament to their betrayal. They believed her lies, but their real crime was never truly seeing me.

As I clung to that cliff, bleeding and broken, a single thought consumed me: Isabella Douglas died here tonight. Now, Isabella Hale would be born from the ashes.

Chapter 1

Isabella "Bella" Douglas POV:

My fiancé, Jameson Blair, married my twin sister today.

The only thing I could do was watch from a grimy café across the street as he slid a simple gold band onto her finger.

That ring was supposed to be mine.

For five years, I'd held on to his promises, each one a flimsy excuse for delaying our wedding. "The truce between the Irish and the Blairs needs to be stronger, Bella." "The Families aren't ready." "Next spring, I promise."

I clung to that last one like a prayer, a fool's petition born from a desperate need to belong somewhere, to finally have a place in The Family.

I had loved him with the fierce, silent loyalty of a soldier. I was a placeholder, a substitute for the woman he really wanted-and I had pretended not to know.

The city clerk's stamp fell, a final, indifferent thud that sealed their union. Jameson didn't even glance in my direction. He only had eyes for Haleigh, my sister. The one who had shattered the original alliance by running away five years ago, leaving him publicly jilted and humiliated.

She emerged from City Hall, radiant, clutching the marriage certificate like a trophy. She had returned two weeks ago with a story that could move mountains: terminal pancreatic cancer.

Her "dying wish" was to finally unite our families, to see the alliance she broke made whole again. It was a lie so perfect, so tragic, that everyone had rushed to believe it.

Haleigh feigned a soft apology to Jameson, something sweet and regretful, before her eyes found mine across the street. A slow, venomous smile spread across her lips.

She turned back to him, her voice a poisonous caress I could almost hear from here.

"Did you ever love her? Or was she just keeping my place warm?"

The silence that followed was a physical thing-a crushing weight that settled in my chest and stole the air from my lungs. Jameson's gaze finally fell on me, his expression unreadable, his voice utterly devoid of emotion when he answered.

"She's Haleigh."

Three words. A death sentence. They confirmed everything I already knew but had refused to accept. I was nothing but a stand-in, a ghost he'd used to soothe his wounded pride.

Haleigh kissed him then, a possessive, triumphant act of ownership. He kissed her back.

My world didn't just crack. It shattered.

A black town car pulled up to the curb. My brothers-Derrick, Blake, and Kane, high-ranking Soldiers in the Douglas clan-spilled out, their faces alight with celebration.

They swarmed Haleigh, their loyalty absolute, their love for her a blinding sun that left me in the shadows. Completely invisible.

They drove away, a happy family, leaving me alone on the sidewalk, an outcast from my own blood.

The memory surfaced, sharp and cruel: the night five years ago, a drunk and heartbroken Jameson who had mistaken me for Haleigh in the shadows of the garden, proposing to a girl he didn't even see. I remembered the lie I'd told myself for five long years-that his affection was real, that my brothers' respect was earned.

Haleigh's return had proved it was all a lie.

I wiped away the one tear I allowed to fall, feeling the grief inside me cool and calcify into something unbreakable. Into steel.

I would never be a substitute again.

I hailed a cab, the yellow car a beacon in the gray city.

"Where to, miss?" the driver asked.

I met his eyes in the rearview mirror, my voice steady and cold.

"Sotheby's International Realty."

"Sell me your most remote, uninhabited island. A place no one would ever think to look."

Continue Reading

Other books by Gavin

More
Contract With The Devil: Love In Shackles

Contract With The Devil: Love In Shackles

Mafia

4.3

I watched my husband sign the papers that would end our marriage while he was busy texting the woman he actually loved. He didn't even glance at the header. He just scribbled the sharp, jagged signature that had signed death warrants for half of New York, tossed the file onto the passenger seat, and tapped his screen again. "Done," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. That was Dante Moretti. The Underboss. A man who could smell a lie from a mile away but couldn't see that his wife had just handed him an annulment decree disguised beneath a stack of mundane logistics reports. For three years, I scrubbed his blood out of his shirts. I saved his family's alliance when his ex, Sofia, ran off with a civilian. In return, he treated me like furniture. He left me in the rain to save Sofia from a broken nail. He left me alone on my birthday to drink champagne on a yacht with her. He even handed me a glass of whiskey—her favorite drink—forgetting that I despised the taste. I was merely a placeholder. A ghost in my own home. So, I stopped waiting. I burned our wedding portrait in the fireplace, left my platinum ring in the ashes, and boarded a one-way flight to San Francisco. I thought I was finally free. I thought I had escaped the cage. But I underestimated Dante. When he finally opened that file weeks later and realized he had signed away his wife without looking, the Reaper didn't accept defeat. He burned down the world to find me, obsessed with reclaiming the woman he had already thrown away.

He Chose The Mistress, Losing His True Queen

He Chose The Mistress, Losing His True Queen

Mafia

5.0

I was the Architect who built the digital fortress for the most feared Don in New York. To the world, I was Brendan Wiggins’s silent, elegant Queen. But then my burner phone buzzed under the dinner table. It was a photo from his mistress: a positive pregnancy test. "Your husband is celebrating right now," the caption read. "You are just the furniture." I looked across the table at Brendan. He smiled and held my hand, lying to my face without blinking. He thought he owned me because he saved my life ten years ago. He told her I was just "functional." That I was a barren asset he kept around to look respectable, while she carried his legacy. He thought I would accept the disrespect because I had nowhere else to go. He was wrong. I didn't want to divorce him—you don't divorce a Don. And I didn't want to kill him. That was too easy. I wanted to erase him. I liquidated fifty million dollars from the offshore accounts only I could access. I destroyed the servers I had built. Then, I contacted a black-market chemist for a procedure called "Tabula Rasa." It doesn't kill the body. It wipes the mind clean. A total hard reset of the soul. On his birthday, while he was out celebrating his bastard son, I drank the vial. When he finally came home to find the empty house and the melted wedding ring, he realized the truth. He could burn the world down looking for me, but he would never find his wife. Because the woman who loved him no longer existed.

You'll also like

Chapters
Read Now
Download Book